A few weeks ago, students & staff at Purdue built their own super computer in just a few hours. When they finished, it was, at that moment, it was #40 out of the top 500 fastest computers on the planet. Multi-core processor architecture is also already here and functional. This is not just projections, as in Intel’s Terascale project, but Tilera’s approach to “tiled processors” suggests a wave of exponential rather than incremental growth, and swiftly. As Meshverse notes in the above link, Tilera started “started shipping a 64-core processor with an on-chip network called iMesh” last year(2007).

One of the fascinating aspects of this ’tiled’ approach is the premise of “is very much like the Internet on a chip,” as noted by Tilera’s founder & CTO Anant Agarwal.

“The hope of the industry is to double the number of cores every 18 months. My prediction is, by 2014, we will have 1,000-core architectures. But the problem is, [current] architectures don’t scale.”